What can be done to prevent more dangerous heatwaves in Europe?
Does Europe need to plant more trees in it’s cities?
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change - public transit over cars, recycling, reducing carbon footprint better compared to other parts of the world. Of course all communities can do better at reducing their carbon footprint - Is this America’s fault with their carbon footprint that Europe is suffering? America has their cars, and simply cranks up their Air conditioners when it’s hot.
What else is there to do? I thought China had success improving their renewable energy output, even though they are still polluters, is it the actions of China and the USA causing misery in Europe? How do we help Europeans suffering and prevent this from happening again?
There is nothing else to do. We went beyond the tipping point on warming and those in charge didn’t listen. It only gets worse from here.
nothing, nothing we do now will stop the warming. if we end all fossil fuel burning, concrete production, and livestock production tomorrow, the atmosphere will continue to warm for hundreds of years before peaking. We are cooked. Grab your popcorn.
And yet we must stop climate change instead of making it even worse.
Sorry. But this comment made me think of this:
Anyway? We’re fucked and the game now is to mitigate and adapt.
👆
Also, it would be helpful not to worsen it with some hype, currently AI or to let go of old fossil technology. But there we go.
This. What part of “well past the tipping point” do people not understand? The time to take drastic action was 20 years ago. It’s “adapt or die” time. The good news is, the elderly are more vulnerable so that should help with the population decline issue.
nothing, nothing we do now will stop the warming.
What if (theoretically speaking, because I don’t think we’re close yet) we rolled out carbon-capture technology and implementation on a massive scale? How much useful impact would that have on mitigating CC versus how much of that is still out of our hands?
Carbon capture technology was always some kind of excuse that execs had to pollute today because we could theoretically fix it in the future.
Despite some technology that works to remove carbon from the atmosphere, it’s just not viable. We output so much CO2 to the atmosphere that we just have no capacity to even build enough carbon capture facilities to reach net zero, and that’s without taking their energy consumption into account. Even if we stopped producing CO2 tomorrow, and suddenly enough carbon capture facilities to capture carbon at the same rate we were releasing it appeared, it would still take decades to make a meaningful change.
And carbon isn’t our only problem. Methane is a way worse greenhouse gas, and we keep releasing it to the atmosphere because it’s cheaper than trying to control it.
This is not to discourage from building such carbon capture technology. If it’s powered by renewables and built without a significant carbon/other contaminants footprint, by all means, build it. But it won’t save us from what’s to come.
So lets do nothing uh?
Fuck it I will do my best.
I’m not saying do nothing. I’m saying nothing can be done about the warming.
End all fossil fuel use asap and make trade blocks that prefer countries that do the same. Tarrifs gor those that use dirty fuels beyond the Eurobloc’s schedule.
Remember, even if we stopped today, there is a 20 year lag time so it’s getting way, way worse.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil-fuels#tracking
We are still growing fossil fuel use. The repercussions are enormous, and effectively, permanent.
But that would hurt fossil fuel companies, so we can’t do that. (/jk)
At this point we need to spend all of our effort in advancing ways we can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean, we are fucked unless we find an efficient way to do so.
Yes, but I don’t believe there is any process could ever be efficient enough.
Deep ocean algae farms might do it. Oil companies have brought up and side lined research on it for decades however.
Build a big ass wall that keeps out the heat, and mexico will pay for it!
They’re going have to actually focus on Green based energy instead of relying to America and China and many more other countries to do so.
America??? Our president right now is trying to push for COAL!!!
And Reiche in Germany wants to undo the move to renewables.
The major pollutants are manufacturing, mining, oil and energy production, and animal agriculture. not air conditioners. If we want the rest of the world to stop producing with manufacturing, you’re going to need to create agreements to share your wealth in ways that do not require the exchange of goods. That’s why people over-produce right now. For money. That’s why the world will continue to get hotter for the considerable future. Nobody wants to be the ones to give away our wealth for free. You need to take care of your people and install air conditioners like the rest of the world. Good luck finding somewhere in China without air conditioning.
Wouldn’t simply addressing climate change generally be the answer? I don’t understand why this might be confusing.
Because billionaires make that impossible.
The CEO of starbucks lives in LA. The HQ of starbucks is in Seattle.
He COULD move the HQ to LA. He COULD buy a 2nd house in Seattle.
Instead he takes his own personal commercial jet DAILY from LA to Seattle, and back again. Every day.
There is a commercial jet that flies the skies, using up fuel, and burning through the atmosphere 365 days a year.
All because this fuckwit doesn’t want to have a ZOOM meeting.
That’s one billionaire. One. Now think of the fact that 1 billionaire on average creates more environmental damage than 1 million regular people combined.
And that’s ONE. Now think of all the billionaires in the world. Combined.
And then there’s America. I live in America. If I need something from the store, I’ll walk. Yeah, it may be a 15 minute walk. Each way. But, c’mon. It’s not that far. By the time you look for your keys, and open the garage, and start the car, and everything, you’re looking at 5-10 minutes anyways. May as well just walk. I got a little wagon I use to carry all my groceries. It handles 750lbs.
Now, every car on the road, doing these short little trips. It feels like not much, but it adds up.
On top of all that, I have a theory that paved surfaces retain natural heat, and in the case of black tar surfaces, RAISE the heat.
As opposed to grass, which would lower it.
But billionaire or middle class, nobody wants to give up their ammenities. Even if the planet suffers. Guess we’ll all just die in an inferno.
should the EU take action against billionaires or the US to address climate change? I suppose they could impose sanctions, fines, or something to save EU lives?
Yes, they should.
Trumo’s threat to impose new, higher, tariffs on EU for starting to legislate against US tech monopolies and support local startups show how it would go.
But better to put it forwards under the chicken taco and make headway, and then future US leaders (if any) would have to make open moves against environmental measures.
The EU could take steps towards less dependency of the US (and other continents for that matter)
Or Guillitines. I’m good with that too.
Many people seem comfortable with bringing back guillotines, including me. It would be interesting to see the reaction.
Lemme tell you man, i don’t think you can sound more impersonal and alien then you are doing now. Yes I would vote to do something about, yes. Maybe some hanging is required.
Note that that “1%” isn’t just millionaires and billionaires. Anyone lower middle class and up in the Western world is part of that 1%. People mistakenly think the jet setters are the main polluters. Everyone who isn’t poor in the West is the main polluter.
Ideally, yes. But we’re way past the point where mitigation alone can solve this. We need climate change adaptation, too.
Is Europe addressing climate change?
The idea we seem to be going with is that we could kill everyone in Europe who isn’t extremely wealthy. Then there will be no one in that region in danger from climate change, and far less pollution globally.
Or we could guillotine the most wealthy in Europe, which would be interesting
Yes, I fully support the genocide of the global top 1%.
What else is there to do?
Wait.
We can do things, or we have done things, and then we have to wait until the results happen.
The current trouble originates from what we have done during the last decades/centuries. Everything we do now will have impact on what we will experience a few decades/centuries later.
But nothing that we do “now” can change things “now”.
I think there’s more that Europe can do besides sit back and wait.
Since over 1000 people have died, European countries can plan for the next heat wave. Apparently some people have drowned because they swam in areas they didn’t realize were more dangerous than they appeared. Installing informative signs or posting life guards in high traffic areas could save lives at rivers and lakes. That’s just one idea.
We know the elderly have disproportionately died and they don’t notice the heat as well due to poor blood circulation, so sharing information specifically for seniors in their languages could save lives. There’s still plenty to learn and do now.
According to the UN and other organizations: To PREVENT the heatwaves, it is crucial that the amount of CO2 released globally is reduced. All nations need to tighten laws to lower CO2 production. This means you need to VOTE for the right party. To MITIGATE the effects of the heatwaves, countries can do many things: plant trees in towns (as they lower temperatures due to evaporation and shade), improve architecture etc. That may not help too much though, as the intensity and length of the heatwaves will continue to increase over the next decades. So reduction of CO2 released is the best bet.
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change - public transit over cars, recycling, reducing carbon footprint better compared to other parts of the world.
No. It wasn’t enough by far
There have been many right ideas, but what has actually been done was only a tiny little change, not significant.
Interesting. What are a couple things Europe should do to reduce it’s carbon footprint?
Stop burning things (oil, gas, …).
(Stop does not mean reduce by 3%)Stop producing and buying so many animals for food.
Grow new woods (real large, not tiny).
Europe is already better per capita than most regions. not much point in getting Europeans to cut C02 more when Americans are still driving tanks and burning coal.
Do you blame the US or other polluter nations for Europe’s heatwave?
It’s a tantalizing idea simply to blame the US for the deteriorating climate in Europe. But that seems both pointless and unjustified. Industrialization and excessive emissions started in Europe. We have gone into debt far enough ourselves in a manner of speaking, we can’t blame the yanks although their government currently is … well, you know.
Europeans are going to buy air conditioners and they will probably outfit cooling facilities that people can seek refuge from the heat in as a stop gap measure. That’s definitely causing more nuclear waste in France where atom splitting reigns supreme. Although nuclear power generation will suffer when rivers needed for cooling become mere trickles. And for the rest of the continent one can only hope they don’t burn shit to turn turbines to make more power. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
There is no way to prevent these heatwaves; the damage is already done. If we stopped burning stuff today everywhere, we could prevent them from getting worse. That’s just a very sensible pipe dream unfortunately.
I was under the impression that Europe’s current carbon footprint was lower than much of the world.
Nuclear energy is an interesting discussion. I’ve heard the suggestion that it’s one good alternative specifically for now until communities and countries can get better renewable energy alternatives. But people can be so weary due to the low but real risk that things have gone wrong in the past.
Current? Maybe. Since the 1750s? Nope.
Nuclear power is also a stop gap solution if you ask me. It isn’t clean. It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.
The problem is batteries. If we could have batteries that store the sun and wind energy for when sun and wind are on a break, we’d be set. We don’t have that. The tech isn’t there yet. And we’d probably empoverish all the countries who are unfortunate enough to have the necessary rare earths in the ground in the process. We’re fucked in more ways than one.
It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.
It’s a very small amount that can be contained in secure casks and concentrated in a particular secure location in the middle of nowhere as opposed to other industrial wastes that are blasted out into the environment and our lungs.
You do need cooling water to keep a plant operational at full power by ensuring your condenser can handle all the steam coming in. If it can’t due to declining river volume then the operators must reduce power (thus making less steam which needs less condensing), if they for whatever reason were not paying attention to the alarms going off then their plant would automatically shut down for loss of condenser vacuum and restore that margin by itself. You don’t have to use rivers as the source of cooling for every nuclear reactor either though some existing ones are designed that way. You can source water from oceans, lakes, groundwater, heck you can make artificial bodies of water that are filled with surplus water and can be used in times of diminished water from whatever is used to feed them, etc.
A fair warning up top: my mind is very much made up about this. The risks of nuclear power generation from feeding the grid until the radiation mess has half-lived itself into harmlessness are too great in my opinion. And that’s what this is. My opinion. I suspect yours differs. If you keep reading, you’ll probably get the feeling that there isn’t anything you can point out that gets through to me. Because, truthfully, it doesn’t.
It’s a very small amount that can be contained in secure casks and concentrated in a particular secure location in the middle of nowhere …
In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.
A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.
I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.
No one changes minds on the internet but I like to yap so w/e though I did almost drop when my draft got wiped.
In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.
Lower populations are fine and plenty of undesirable villages are depopulating as young folks move to the cities and pensioners shuffle off this coil. Find one with an agreeable populace (not as hard as you think, many communities actually try to be selected for waste disposal projects and try to promote their site over others), no seismic activity of importance for a geologically sustained period of time, and impermeable clay soil far below any important aquifer. Place it there with compacted bentonite clay or similar as a liner. Insanely low hydraulic conductivity (~10^-13 m/s) through the torturous paths in the clay which also simultaneously has a strongly adsorbent effect where the solute gets scrubbed out by the clay while the water is on its long journey out means even if the cans fail and a substantial amount of material gets out it won’t be going far… not enough moving aggressively enough to impact hundreds of feet above. As it happens there was already a trial run done by Mother Nature billions of years ago in the natural nuclear reactors of Oklo, Gabon and it turned out that the fission products didn’t get very far at all even with less than ideal materials.
A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.
It’s a rare river that suddenly deletes itself with no forewarning of reduction in flow but anyway the amount of water needed for sustained cooling of fuel pools is substantially lower than that needed to support active operation at full power so if the river reroutes itself entirely or whatever you have in mind then you can scram to shut the plant down. Then your remaining needs can be handled by onsite water storage which is mandated by the regulator along with alternate flexible means of getting the water into the pools such as using firehoses. I’ve seen a site that pumped groundwater to cool the reactor and there was no concern of depletion because it was near a water source that left it constantly charged, even excessively so to the point that flooding would regularly render some of the pump stations inaccessible except by boat in the wetter seasons of the year. I was not getting at building a dam to save a nuke plant but rather pointing out that there are many different designs that can handle different environmental conditions so having hot and low flow rivers does not entirely cancel the prospects for nuclear power entirely even if some specific sites are rendered uneconomical and IF it is worth it perhaps alternatives may exist for a particular site like extending storage ponds and tanks to ride out irregularities in weather and river flow. It’s a good idea to have a mixed power grid that’s not overly reliant on one or two elements subject to shocks.
I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.
The halt on nuclear but continuing energy demand resulted in continued massive rollout of fossil fuels with all their attending health consequences and the cøimate crisis. Nuclear is right at the bottom of deaths per MW produced between solar and wind. Hydro and the natural gas are two orders of magnitude higher and coal is yet another. If people think that for their area nuclear is prudent and can convince and live up to the standards of the regulator then I see no reason to stand in their way and tell them no such that they build some way deadlier energy source. A lot of expansion is happening for nuclear, much more for solar, and I see both of those developments as really really good if they are preventing something worse like gas from coming online. For what it’s worth ithe worst of the three accidents you mentioned is not physically possible in western reactors which have a negative void coefficient of reactivity whereas Chernobyl had a positive one. In the Chernobyl reactor graphite was the moderator (slows down neutrons to a speed where they will actually interact with the fuel) and water was the coolant whereas in western reactors water is both the coolant and moderator. So at Chernobyl the water wasn’t as good at moderating as the graphite and actually acted as a neutron absorber that ate up neutrons without contributing to fission reactions. So when they heated up, the water expanded and became less good at absorbing which meant less neutrons got consumed so more flew on into the graphite to get moderated and could cause fissions which made more power which boiled more water to repeat the cycle and that’s how you got a runaway reaction at a plant that also didn’t even have a containment. In western reactors since the water is the moderator if it expands from heating then it also becomes worse at slowing down the neutrons because more are sailing through and not slowing down to interact with the fuel. So this limits how high you can get the power much more sharply, plus we have containments to keep the material there even if the vessel loses its integrity. This is part of why the deaths and radioactive releases are insanely less for the other two combined vs. Chernobyl. Those events changed how nuclear does business and inaugurated WANO and comprehensive sharing of operating experience and strategies on safely operating plants, including on beyond design basis accidents in the wake of the unprecedented earthquake and tsunami combo that took out Fukushima. Honestly for mostly safe but occasionally punctuated with insanely deadly and/or displacing tragedies hydro should be considered as scarier than nuclear, meanwhile fossil fuels are just slowly killing people everywhere to general shrugs.
The only way to carbon neutrality is nuclear. “Renewables” require a metric shit-tonne of fossil fuel burning and non-renewable materials mined from the ground to be made, all putting out and endless stream of carbon. Nuclear? Basically none.
The nuclear waste is a drop in the ocean compared to the landfill created from “renewables”. We’ll end up just blasting it off into outer space one of these days anyway.
Eat less meat, beef in particular.
I already abstain from beef for environmental reasons. And limit my dairy too.
I heard that the local nut farms in my region consume a lot of ground water. and the majority of their sales are abroad, so I try to eat less nuts now too. I don’t want to support nut farms in my area that majority focus on selling abroad or to far away places, because us locals need that ground water more than their profits.
europe needs to invest in ACs, apparently the continent temperatures rises alot faster than other continents as for an immediate solution, long term, they need to accelerate into green energy.
You know those reflector screens they put in cars, yeah picture that but enough to cover a continent.
What if the reflective screen is angled towards another planet and signs of life appear?!
I was thinking aiming it back at the sun to give it a taste of its own medicine but your idea works as well.
